Contact centers may be used by an organization to communicate in an efficient and systematic manner with outside parties. Such centers may for example have large numbers of agents staffing telephones, and interacting with outside parties and with each other. Calls may be placed on hold or into an interactive voice response (IVR) system when first connected to the contact center; subsequently an agent may take a call, place it back on hold, transfer the call, conference in another agent, or take other such actions related to the call.
It may be helpful to the agents or to other members of the organization to have access to information about individual calls or devices, or to obtain statistical information about the operation of the contact center, such as, for example, the average or maximum caller hold time during the previous hour. Such information may also be of use, for example, to contact center systems used to route calls to available agents or to agents qualified to handle a particular issue. A contact center monitoring system which maintains and organizes such information should be able to handle large numbers of calls, agents, and devices, without significant degradation in performance; viz. such a system should be scalable to larger installations without being limited by a performance bottleneck. In particular, a simple approach suitable for a small system, such as maintaining all of the contact center state information in a database, stored in a back-end database server, and accessed via multiple front-end clients, may be unacceptable because it may suffer from multiple hardware and software bottlenecks at the single server, the load on which may increase rapidly as the contact center increases in size.
Thus, there is a need for a scalable system for maintaining contact center state information.